On the morning of Jan. 14, a launching ceremony was held at the international meeting room in the Korea Press Center in Seoul for a national campaign that seeks to force the South Korean government to scrap its settlement with Japan on the comfort women and that hopes to achieve a just solution to the comfort women issue. The campaign includes 335 individuals and 383 organizations spanning the areas of women’s rights, the law, and history. During the meeting, plans also began to take shape for setting up a civic foundation to address this issue.

At the launching ceremony on Thursday, the groups taking part in the campaign asserted once again that the Dec. 28 settlement reached by the two countries’ foreign ministers was an ill-conceived scheme that failed to satisfy the demands of the former comfort women and the groups supporting them.

“We will be joining with people around the world to demand that the Japanese government acknowledge the crimes that it committed, make an official apology that is clear and irrevocable, provide reparations as evidence of that apology, and carry out a thorough investigation of the issue, the results of which should be reflected in history education and memorials,” the group said.

The group also officially announced its plans to set up a private foundation, which was proposed in opposition to the foundation that Seoul decided to establish with a grant of 1 billion yen (US$8.30 million).

The official name of the private foundation will be the Justice and Memory Foundation for the Imperial Japanese Army’s Comfort Women. Its main projects will be providing welfare and support for the surviving comfort women, carrying out a thorough investigation of what happened, preserving related records, setting up more statues of the young girl that symbolize the comfort women, organizing other memorials, and providing education related to the comfort women.

“Tens of thousands of women were kidnapped, and no one knows if they lived or died. What are we supposed to do with Shinzo Abe’s money if he doesn’t make a sincere apology?” said Kim Bok-dong, one of the surviving comfort women, during the press conference on Thursday. “I hope that you will join us to set up a foundation and fight for the women who might still be alive and suffering somewhere, the women who have endured the same things as we have.”

Along with setting up the foundation, the campaign is planning to build public support for scrapping the Dec. 28 agreement and to urge the National Assembly to pledge to invalidate the current agreement and enter a new phase of negotiations.

On Feb. 18, the Asian Solidarity Conference is planning to hold an emergency meeting of its representatives in order to resolve the comfort women issue.

“I think that if we can get the public on our side, it will be possible to scrap the Dec. 28 agreement,” said co-representative Yoon Mee-hyang, co-representative of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Jeongdaehyeop).

By Park Tae-woo, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]